I was initially intrigued by Super Crunchers because my company, Offermatica, is featured in it. So be on guard: I have reason to like this book. That said — this glowing review is firmly rooted in my love of the data-based decision paradigm — not my pride in working at Offermatica.

Written by econometrician and lawyer Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers is an exploration of how statistics practitioners continue to reshape our world. Using randomized testing and regression analysis, the Super Crunchers create mathematical models to solve real world problems. Prof. Ayres details how crunching the numbers is changing online marketing, entertainment, education and medicine. Virtually every aspect of society can benefit.

One of the central themes of the book is that these models consistently outperform humans with expertise. Ayres submits that humans (even world-renowned experts) are plagued by overconfidence, egos and emotions. Mathematical models don’t get it right 100% of the time but the models consistently outperform the experts. Gatekeepers relying purely on experience and instinct are a dying breed. This fact warms my heart.

The downside is that Super Crunchers demand as much relevant data as possible. Your actions are being recorded like never before. Database aggregators link disparate sources of information together. Privacy lovin’ individuals (i.e. most of us) are bound to be a tad uncomfortable. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a greater good somewhere in all this supercrunching.

My biggest complaint about the book is that Ayres’s suggested readings don’t contain anything on Applied Super Crunching. I’ve taken some statistics courses but would love to know more about Super Crunching methodology. Then again, maybe that’s subject matter of his next book.

Technorati Tags: Offermatica, Super Crunchers, Ian Ayres

For those of you who don’t know yet, I’m proud to be part of the team at Offermatica (recently acquired by Omniture). Here is what I’m sure will be the first in a series of shamless plug posts as I use most of my energy to get settled in SF. 

The Wall Street Journal’s list of best-selling books for the week ending September 8, 2007 - 2 out of the Top 14 mention Offermatica:

• No. 2: Four-Hour Workweek;
  
• No.13: Super Crunchers

Full list here:

(Credit to Stephanie Yang at Offermatica.)

Technorati Tags: Offermatica, Omniture, Super Crunchers, Four-Hour Workweek

My good buddy Arun has been working ferociously on this new product from AOL — my.aol.com. If you have a moment, click on the link and visit the mgnet feature. mgnet is a recommendation engine with an innovative interface for selecting content relevant to you. It uses pictures as a way of getting at what you like and don’t like. Congrats Arun — this product is engaging and really fun to use. Although I’m not sure what it says about my character that I keep getting this picture of Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell recommended to me.

Technorati Tags: aol, mgnet

As an Entrepreneur, I’m fascinated with the concepts that have come to be known as Business Intelligence. Fundamentally business intelligence refers to a data-warehouse filled with information from all areas of the company. The data can then be presented in reports tying previously disparate information together. Take it a step further and you can mine the data looking for relationships not yet uncovered. Pretty awesome.

The Analytic in me thinks this is a dream come true. After all, one should be able to focus clearly in on what metrics drive performance then monitor, manage and reward based on them. It takes the complex process of managing a company and simplifies it. It removes the messiness of human folly. What you’re left with is clean, gorgeous graphs, delicious drill-downs and sublime dashboards. It’s every executive’s dream come true, isn’t it?

Here’s the thing: Before you can develop any meaningful B.I. implementation, you have to know where you want to go. So start by developing a strategy. Then you’ve got to work on determining what really is going to drive that strategy. So one must work with one’s management team to determine the core measures that will determine success. Then comes the daunting task of getting everybody on board. One has to manage internal politics, expectations, fear and misunderstanding. All of a sudden, this B.I. implementation has turned rather messy.

My point is that, as hard as you try, there’s no simple way to run a company. The technology is only a tool to help you stay on track and support you in your decision making. It’s your job to get the right people headed in the right direction, quickly. Don’t look to B.I. to do that for you.

Technorati Tags: business intelligence, KPIs, dashboards

Good evening.

Tonight was another excellent edition of the phenomenon known as democamp. For those of you too lazy to click the link, democamp is basically a bunch of software (and occasionally hardware) geeks gathering in a room. Five people volunteer to demo their latest creations. Each volunteer gets about 15 minutes and, at the end, everyone has drinks and mingles.

domainer.com

First up was domainer.com which is a custom web server and content management app designed specifically for managing a whole lotta domains. To paraphrase the presenter, domainer treats domain names as the atomic units of web development. It’s pretty basic right now but has a solid user interface. One interesting feature is how it deals with themes. The programmers have chosen to decouple structure from look and feel which is tough to explain in words so I won’t even try. In sum, it’s a solid app that will become more intriguing as more functional components are added.

feelingbullish.com

Feelingbullish.com is a site for investors seeking honest user-generated financial information. The Internet is littered with messageboards and forums containing low-quality information from unknown sources. Feelingbullish attempts to solve this problem by providing a community where all users become stock analysts. Users then develop a reputation based on the votes of other users and an analysis of their success. I think it’s a great idea — and one that I wish I had thought of.

paruba.com

Paruba.com is pretty much the exact site that my business partner Reg talked about building last year. (Check it out Reg.) It’s a place where you can create lists of products that you like from around the Internet. (Think del.icio.us and flickr for e-commerce.) The theory is that these products say something about you. You can browse other lists or grab items off any site on the Internet. The UI is slick and the whole thing looks really easy to use.

Two interesting insights from the presenter about taking on a project that is outside of your core business: (1) if you try to do things in your spare time — things don’t happen — you have to invest in a project to make it go and (2) you won’t get things done until you feel the pain — turning down paying contracts will motivate you to complete your pet project.

the glove

An excellent presentation injecting a little hardware into the ol’ democamp. Cameron Browning demostrated a 3-D visualization tool for file structures. It was entertaining — check out the link for more details.

Damian Conway and Perl 6

The final presenter was Damian Conway. For those of you who don’t know Mr. Conway check this from his bio:

Currently he runs an international IT training company – Thoughtstream – which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry’s design decisions.

Damian was great. First of all, he got around the whole no PPT rule by tweaking VIM to act as his presentation software. Very clever indeed. Next he lead us through a brief tour of Perl 6. I understood about 32% of what he was talking about at the time, but failed to write any of it down. Just put “Perl 6″ into your Google alerts or something.

For those in Toronto, I encourage you to go check out Damian tomorrow July 5th. He’s speaking at 6:30 pm at 40 St. George and the topic will be “Fun with dead languages”. Should be a hoot.

This post is long enough. But lastly I just wanted to say again that meeting people is the best part of democamp. For some reason the vibe is so relaxed that it just makes for good conversation. Thanks to the organizers.

Technorati Tags: democamp, torcamp

This past weekend in Toronto was barcamp tdot held in this massive open space in Liberty Village. (For those of you not from Toronto — Liberty Village is in an up and coming part of town filled with software shops and both g-rated and adult media offices.

The first talk I went to was about elements of design and was lead by John Green of Nuvvo. Although I have played around with Photoshop for a number of years, I never took the time to understand the fundamentals of on-screen graphics. John discussed things like vector vs. raster graphics and additive vs. subtractive colour theory. I learned quite a bit but not that much of it was applicable to my day-to-day work. If I could wish upon a star, it would be that the next talk focus more on things web developers need help with such as layout and selection of colour palettes.

Next I dropped by the Extreme Programming room and got to work with Mishkin Berteig of AgileAdvice.com. The XP room was set up to mimic a typical software development project with one moderator acting as the customer. Mishkin worked patiently with us to demonstrate how we’d go about putting agile programming practices to use. Unfortunately 45 minutes just wasn’t enough time to get much done. I really enjoyed wrapping my head around the problem and would have definitely got a lot more out of it if I had spent the rest of the afternoon there, but I wanted to check out other topics.

Next I was off to a talk lead by Derek and Ryan of Redflagdeals.com about making money on the Internet in Canada. This was a lively discussion. Here are all the insights in one big list:

• know your audience - and create content relevant to them
• credibility is crucial - develop a relationship with your audience
• interaction (forgot to take notes on this point)
• 80/20 rule applies - 20% of audience are power users that provide 80% of profit - get to know them and treat them like gold
• good content is viral
• Chad from tophost.com encouraged us to look beyond Canada and the US
• Ken from onedegree.ca cautioned us not to target a niche within a niche
• other sites mentioned: postbidwin.com, moola.com, conceptshare.com, zoomer.com and some others…

For the last couple sessions I walked around and did the tour thing. It probably wasn’t the best idea because at times it was difficult to hear what was going on and I really didn’t get a feel for the group.

Regardless, I had an excellent time hanging out with everybody. Thank you to the organizers and all the sponsors. I’m wearing my barcamp tdot t-shirt right now.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamptdot, torcamp

I attended my first barcamp/democamp last night — and it was really interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. For those of you who don’t know what it is that I’m talking about — you can learn all about barcamp here and democamp here. (It’s basically a place where people can informally show off their cool applications and there’s no Powerpoint allowed.)

The best part

Before I go on to describe the night’s demos, I wanted to mention that the best part was going to the bar afterwards and hanging out with everybody. I found everyone to be really warm and friendly and hey it’s a chance to talk geek. I got to talk to David for a bit and had long chats with Eric and Sunir too.

The demos

First off there was a team from the University of Toronto who built a forum for Kids Help Phone based on JForum. The team did extensive customizations of the product to suit their client’s needs. The whole thing performed really well and, although the technology was perhaps not as novel as other presenters, it was very professional and I could see that the application was going to work.

Chris Nolan then presented his framework for working with Javascript in Ruby. I haven’t played around enough with Ruby to really understand the scope of the problem he was solving, but if you want to see an application check this out.

BlogMatrix was next. It’s a really impressive blogging engine that incorporates maps and calendar data into a blog post. The calendar’s scheduling features are really powerful and allow you to add all sorts of different events to your personal time management software. BlogMatrix uses Microformats extensively which is very geeky and very cool.

The creators of Releaseme.ca stepped up and showed us an amazing search implementation using Ruby and AJAX. They also described their commitment to the “Back” button and how they work around problems when AJAX breaks it.

Then it was Dabble’s turn. It’s an online spreadsheet application which has more power to transform, manipulate and organize your data than Excel itself. Click on that Dabble link and play around with it when you can. My words cannot do it justice.

Finally, a brave man from HP (it was already 8pm and people were restless to get to the bar) displayed HP Open View an Enterprise level user management system that works with multiple, different web servers. If you’ve got 300,000 users and run different web servers and need to manage permissions, check it out.

Miscellaneous Geek Stuff

RE: Java vs. Ruby

If you think you’ve done your job by picking your side and arming yourself with the relevant data, you’re wrong. You still have to consider Smalltalk and Squeak. (And yes, there’s a web application framework too.) The language wars include Smalltalk people!

Quote of the night

(paraphrasing) “I just felt like this application was asking to be written in Ruby.” - Pete from Unspace.ca

***

Thanks to the organizers and I’m really looking forward to the next one.

Technorati Tags: democamp, democamptdot, barcamp, tdot, geeks, smalltalk

I’m collaborating with someone who has a passion for Web Standards. I’ve often been curious about people to get really passionate about standards. What’s the big deal anyway? I’ve always just thought of them as a way of tearing down the barriers to entry that proprietary formats serve so well. But truth be told, I don’t have the passion to fight against the dot doc format. So I asked my new friend Natalie what drives her passion for standards. Here’s her reply:

I got so into standards because they make the Internet work for everybody, from folks using dial up in Africa to jetsetters on their PDAs in NYC. In my humble opinion, the Internet is the great equalizer and makes worlds available that might not otherwise be (without the ability for so many people to share vast amounts of information very quickly). Barriers to that access just seem ridiculous and are fundamentally out of alignment with my commitment to a world that works for everyone with no one left out, no rock unturned. That’s why I’m intense about standards. And because it’s fun.

I think it’s an interesting perspective for those of us working in, on or around the Internet. If you choose to design and throw standards out the window, you are putting up barriers. These are barriers to potential customers, friends, vendors both here and abroad.

Technorati Tags: webstandards, opendocument, Internet

I was at Del.icio.us today and happened upon Todoque. After reading the site once, I frantically looked around for links. I even pulled up the ol “View Source” to find some. Then I reread the site more closely:

• “Todoque is just a life, work and business attitude.
• Todoque is just a convention.
• The power comes in accepting the convention.
• There is nothing to learn.”

That last point is a bit misleading. I had to learn was that Todoque was one page and is not connected to any community, software or tools. In that way it is unlike almost every other site on the Internet. I also had to learn that it’s just an effort to create a convention. That’s all.

I don’t know about you, but I find this social experiment fascinating. Is this how conventions are created? Are people going to start using Todoquian language to communicate? What is it’s advantage? Why Todoque, why?

Technorati Tags: todoque, todoquian, usability, del.icio.us, convention

Similicio.us is a pretty interesting site that helps you find sites similar to a selection of your choice. So try it out, put in your favourite site and see what happens.

(Don’t worry, I’ve anticipated your next move — here are the sites returned as similar to good ‘ol Festive.net:

• basement.org
• dottactics.blogspot.com
• simon.incutio.com
• noscope.com
• businesslogs.com
• edcorner.stanford.edu
• entrepreneur.com
• technorati.com
• bigpicture.typepad.com
• blogrolling.com
• memeorandum.com
• slashdot.org
• brucejudson.com
• gigaom.com
• thebillablehour.com
• theshop.dk
• indwes.edu
• hassleme.co.uk
• workdaycontrol.com
• noisebetweenstations.com)

Next?

I can think of a couple way to extend this service that may be useful: (1) a Firefox extension that incorporates Similicio.us in real time. When you’re surfing a particularly useful or entertaining site, you could find similar content without having to search and (2) a Similicio.us browser history analysis that would provide you a list of sites that you would currently don’t visit but might enjoy.

Similicio.us to stay

The success or failure of this service will depend on how well they adapt their service to solve real problems of everyday Internet users. The relevancy of the results is the most important factor here. If people don’t get good suggestions, then they won’t: (1) come back and (2) tell their friends. The second most important factor is figuring out how this service can really help people. Finding similar sites isn’t really at the top of my agenda most days. The service can, however, be extended to solve pressing problems. For example, I think my two suggestions above are decent because lately I’ve been unsatisfied with my Google results and would like to try something else. I still need to search for content. Perhaps Similicio.us can help me do that faster and better.

Technorati Tags: Similicio.us, similar, firefox, strategy